Before the sexual-assault claims against Justice Brett Kavanaugh totally fell apart, one of the knocks on him, wielded almost as evidence of his guilt, was that he went to an all-boys school.

When NPR set out last decade to define a “bro” (“a specific kind of fratty masculinity”), one of the criteria was a tendency to hang out with other dudes.

If you paid attention to the past 20 years, you noticed that the news media found something odd, even unsavory, about the sight of men hanging out with men. It’s exclusionary. It’s discrimination. It’s probably cultivating toxic masculinity, or something.

When an all-boys charter school opened in Washington, D.C., the American Civil Liberties Union tried to block it. In recent years, the Boy Scouts, in the name of exclusivity, started taking in girls.

“These kids are exactly the same; they just happen to have ponytails,” one scout leader proclaimed.

Of course, girls are not exactly the same, and nobody believes that girls are exactly the same, which is why the Girl Scouts still exist as an all-girls organization.

Yet this double-standard has seeped into our culture: It’s good and necessary for women and girls to socialize, gather, learn, work, and play in single-sex groups, but it’s exclusionary and sexist for men and boys to do so.

Women and Democrats, particularly Democratic women, believe that all-female groups are good for society, but don’t believe the same about all-male groups.

Two-thirds of Democratic women in a recent Pew Research Center survey agreed that “all-female social groups have a positive impact on society,” while only one-third of these women believed the same about all-male groups.”

The self-contradiction here is dizzying: There’s no valid reason for men to exclude women (implying there’s no significant difference between men and women), and yet the rules about single-sex socializing are different for men and women (implying there is a fundamental difference between men and women).

The standard liberal argument in these contexts is about power differentials. But in social life and in education, women are not the oppressed minority. Women make up most college students, girls do better in high school than boys, and women have healthier social lives in their 30s and beyond than men.

THE FALLS CHURCH BROTHEL

Male loneliness is a crisis, and one root cause is surely the lack of guys’ nights, rounds of golf, and regular pickup games with the fellas. Too many millennial men absorbed a light sort of feminism and our culture’s over-developed fear of “discrimination,” so the idea of a book club for the guys seems somehow verboten.

Hopefully that’s changing. Hopefully, guys will realize they need guys and a little time away from the ladies.